Somewhere Beneath Sound, Beneath Sea, Beneath Thought
Jakob did not fall.
He dissolved.
One moment he felt the cold marble of the Austrian chamber beneath his knees, Otto's arms around him, the copper cylinder thrumming with impossible light. The next, the world peeled apart like a folded map whose seams had come undone — and Jakob was drawn into the seam, into the thread, into the place between the paper.
He did not remember closing his eyes.
But he knew—somehow—when he was no longer in the room.
There was no up or down. No floor beneath his feet. No body, even—only pressure wrapped around awareness, as though his mind were suspended like a drop of water inside a tuning fork.
At first, there was no sound.
Only the memory of sound.
Then the memory began to speak.
Harmonics brushed across him in long, sweeping waves — soft, layered, familiar, yet impossibly far. He reached toward them the way a lost child reaches toward the glow of a lantern.
…down… down… down…
The words left him before he intended to speak them.
He didn't even know if he had lips here. Or lungs. Or a throat for the sound to climb.
The resonance spoke back.
Not in words.
In gradients.
Pressure rises. Pressure falls. A drift of tone that felt like the hush before snowfall, or the breath of someone listening very closely in the dark.
He drifted through it, weightless, yet tugged by unseen currents.
Shapes moved around him. Not shapes with edges — shapes like memories that had forgotten themselves. Deep curves of sound, swirling like spirals drawn by an unseen hand, each glowing faintly with a color Jakob had no name for.
When he brushed against one, it sang.
The note filled his mind, soft at first, then sharp enough that he flinched—if he had a body left to flinch with. The note echoed, doubled, trembled through his awareness.
Images flickered:
A woman singing a storm to sleep in the far Atlantic.A fisherman humming an old tune in a dark boat.A pane of glass cracking in Murano.Voices crying warnings.Voices calling mercy.Voices whispering loss.
And beneath it all — a single, low, ancient chord.
Older than ships.Older than maps.Older than human memory.
The deep layer.
Jakob would have cried, but tears were a memory he no longer possessed.
A pulse surged through him — not painful, but compelling. Something beneath the deep layer tugged at him like gravity. Not downward. Inward.
Find the deep place.
He didn't know whether he was remembering the words or speaking them. His voice felt like a thing separate from him, a ribbon unspooling.
Jakob drifted toward the pulse.
The resonance thickened.
The spirals grew larger.
They moved around him with solemn purpose, like slow, immense creatures who did not know or care whether he was alive. Each spiral carried memories. Songs. Tides. Lives swallowed by water.
He heard a dozen languages he did not speak, murmuring truths he could suddenly understand.
He heard a lullaby sung by someone who had once loved him.He heard a lullaby sung by someone he had never met.He heard the same lullaby sung by someone who had not yet been born.
The spirals came closer.
He felt their edges brush him — not hard, but insistently.
Not a warning.
An invitation.
He followed.
Something bright flickered in the distance. A thread of silver drawn across dark water.
Jakob drifted toward it.
The thread pulsed.
A voice rose along it — thin, stretched, distant, but unmistakable.
"Jakob…"
He knew the voice.
Otto.
But not Otto speaking now.
Otto remembered.
Jakob reached for the thread with everything he had.
The resonance shuddered.
The spirals responded — tightening, circling, humming in agitation.
The thread of Otto's voice faded. Jakob cried out:
"Don't go! I'm here! I'm—"
His words fragmented. They scattered in the water of the layer. He chased them, reaching for each syllable as though it were a tiny lantern tumbling into tide.
Nothing came.
Jakob drifted deeper.
He could feel the copper chamber far above him, faint as a distant lightning flash behind clouds. He felt the panic in the men above him, the tremor of Eveline's breath, the silent oath Otto made as the resonance consumed them both.
He wanted to go back.
But the layer around him was shifting.
It pulled.
A new chord swept over him — low, rolling, vibrating the entire layer like a great bell struck underwater.
The spirals bowed.
Jakob froze.
Another chord answered.
Higher. Sharper. Desperate.
The spirals recoiled.
Jakob recognized the tone.
Not memory.
Not machine.
Human.
Someone singing.
Someone far away.
Someone calling him.
Luca.
Jakob did not know the name. But the voice carried a filament of desperate care.
Then another voice weaved through it.
A woman.Steady, trembling, determined.
Elena.
The harmonics clashed with the deep-layer chord.
The spirals flinched, shimmering in alarm, as though a foreign sound had dared intrude into the layer's woven silence.
Jakob reached toward the new voices instinctively. They were faint but pure, threaded with the resonance of the sea in its gentler moods.
"Help me," Jakob tried to say.
He didn't know if the sound formed.
But the voices heard something.
Their tones bent toward him, seeking.
The layer responded angrily.
A pressure wave struck Jakob. It rippled through him, through everything left of him, bending his awareness until he felt his sense of self dilate and contract like a lantern flame guttering in wind.
"No—" Jakob whispered, though he did not know if it was real.
The spirals closed in.
They circled him like vast, looming guardians.
Not malicious.
Protective.
They were not trying to hurt him.
They were trying to keep him.
Jakob felt their intention as clearly as if it were spoken:
Stay. You are part of the layer now.
He shook his head — or tried to.
"I'm not… I don't belong here."
The spirals pulsed.
Memory-lights swept past him.
He saw, in terrible beauty:
A drowned ship whose bell still rang in deep currents.A sailor's final prayer, trapped in the tide.A map that rewrote itself every full moon.An island that sank five hundred years before he was born — but whose outline still hummed in the deep.A voice whispering a phrase he had never heard but knew he had always carried:
Draw forward.
Jakob felt his consciousness thin again.
He was forgetting things.
His name.His age.His hands.His face.The color of sky.The warmth of sun.The smell of bread.The sound of laughter.
Only the resonance remained.
He clung to the faint filament of Luca's voice.
It wavered.
It strengthened.
It bent toward his drifting form like a hand extended through water.
"Jakob," Luca whispered through the harmonic thread, each syllable threaded with fear and hope, "hold on. We are coming."
Jakob tried to reach.
The spirals tightened.
A deep-layer chord rose like a mountain collapsing.
He felt himself pulled.
Hard.
The deep remembered him.
And the deep did not let go easily.
He screamed without sound.
The layer swallowed the scream.
But the filament of Luca's voice caught the faintest trace of it.
Jakob felt the thread snap taut.
It hurt.
But it anchored him.
He clung with everything left of himself.
"Please…" he whispered into the layer. "Please… find me…"
The spirals trembled.
The deep-layer chord wavered.
For the first time, Jakob felt uncertainty in the resonance around him.
Not fear.
Recognition.
As though the deep layer understood that someone was reaching for Jakob — just as Jakob had reached for the deep.
A quiet chord flowed through the spiral-band.
Return.
Jakob froze.
The voice was older.Colder.But not unkind.
He did not know who spoke.
But he knew the deep listened.
The layer brightened faintly.
The spirals pulled back a fraction.
Luca's filament-thread strengthened.
Elena's harmony rose behind it.
Jakob reached out—
And the entire layer breathed once.
A sound so immense he could not distinguish sorrow from hope.
Then—
A whisper traveled across the layer in a voice that was neither sea nor human nor memory.
Draw forward.
Jakob clung to the thread of Luca's voice and whispered with all the strength he had left:
"I'm here."
And the deep layer shook.